A large group of people feels one way, while a small
group with a disproportionate amount of structural power
tells them they are wrong to feel it. This is
particularly true for college students around the
country. Their Instagram feeds are full of eviscerated
children, but their passionate protest—the real-world
application of everything their liberal, humanistic
education was supposed to impart—has made them criminal,
first in the eyes of their school administrators, and now
to their government. The tactics of the protest movements
they read about in their textbooks comprise illegal acts.
When I work in downtown Minneapolis, I drive home past a boarded up store spray painted with: “REST IN POWER, GEORGE FLOYD.” Invariably, I read it aloud to myself, alone in the car, and it gives me some hope. After the inhuman, brutal, cruel murder of Floyd in May, I was so relieved to see a national and then international series of protests. Judging by their duration, intensity, and organization, this could be what it looks like when the baton from the Civil Rights movement is taken up again to continue and escalate the fight against the inextricably intertwined institutions of United States racism and United States policing.
There are frequently crickets in the basement of my parent’s home, which nobody likes to kill. So, after accidentally amputating the legs off one too many crickets in attempts to remove them from the premises, my mother devised a system whereby a check box (remember checks?) is used to scoop up the crickets. Recently, my dad was trying to save a cricket, so he asked after the whereabouts of this box. He found it. It’s labeled in permanent marker: “Box for catching/releasing crickets.”
